His niece, shivering also, minced over to him without looking down and put her arms around Samlor’s shoulder. “I’m sorry you hurt your ear, uncle,” she said in a voice that trembled with the child’s attempts to control it. “I shouldn’t have-“
She hugged him harder. “But I thought I could climb up from the bench when it was dark and I didn ‘t know where you were-” Her words tumbled out like flotsam in the current of the sobs wracking her little body.
“-and the, those men came and I couldn’t do anything!”
“You did fine, darling,” the Cirdonian muttered. He encircled the child with his left arm, careful that the point of his push dagger was turned outward. He couldn’t put it away until he cleaned it, the way his right hand was wiping the watered steel of the longer knife on the pantaloons of the boy whose breathing had ceased in a pair of great shudders. “But you’ve gotta listen to me, or really bad things could happen.”
The blade of the long dagger showed a nick midway up one edge, but it had come through the struggle at least as well as any other knife was likely to have done. Samlor tried to sheathe it and found the new blade was a trifle too broad near the tip to fit the scabbard meant for the knife it replaced.
He slid it beneath his belt instead; wiped the push dagger; and rose with that miniature weapon in his right hand while his left arm guided Star behind him again.
“Who would you be, my friend?” Samlor asked the man who was fingering his staff now that his cape was rearranged.